How to best make a kid-safe PC

My son will be four years old soon, and I've scrounged enough random parts together to make him a basic Windows 7 capable system. I have parental controls enabled, UAC turned on, antivirus installed, and firewall turned on.

Now.... what else should I do to lock down this system so that he doesn't end up seeing scheisse porn or something?

Disclaimer: He will almost certainly not be using his PC unsupervised. One of us will either be with him, or in the next room or something. We're not just going to let him go play on it for hours on end.

I know there's some way to pass the DNS requests from his PC through a server/service which I control so that I can specify which sites he's allowed to visit. I forget the name, though...Are those applications which roll back to a snapshot after every reboot worth it, or do they cause as much trouble as they prevent?

I'm going to do my best to teach him safe browsing habits, but he's four, so.... yeah. Then again, he's better at using my iPhone than my parents are, so there's that.

A few notes: disconnecting the PC from the internet is probably not going to be an option, because most of the games he will play will be internet-based. We also want to be able to log into Netflix/Hulu from his PC and load video up. There will probably be some games/apps on there that won't require an internet connection, but so many of those kids games are so shoddily written that they barely worked with XP, much less Windows 7...

I know I'm probably missing some obvious safeguards, so lay 'em on me.

Look into OpenDNS and their standard site filtering. Just manually set the DNS entry to point to their service. Until the kid is more sophisticated, this is a good stop-gap. Past that point, you can lock down DNS via port filtering, or you can move to a full transparent proxy solution on your home network.

Windows Live Family Safety looks pretty decent. It has a few different levels of automatic filtering (including the ability to manually black/whitelist sites), and it will automatically email you a report every week of the user's activity if you want, so you can leave it totally open but still be able to track their usage if you prefer.

It also allows the user to request the ability to view specific websites that accidentally/incorrectly get blocked, apply time restrictions on when/how much they can use the computer, can restrict which applications they can run, and can restrict which local games they can play by rating.

Windows Live Family Safety looks pretty decent. It has a few different levels of automatic filtering (including the ability to manually black/whitelist sites), and it will automatically email you a report every week of the user's activity if you want, so you can leave it totally open but still be able to track their usage if you prefer.

It also allows the user to request the ability to view specific websites that accidentally/incorrectly get blocked, apply time restrictions on when/how much they can use the computer, can restrict which applications they can run, and can restrict which local games they can play by rating.

It's free to use as well.

It's OK. My main issue with it, aside from not liking MSFT's Windows Live stuff much, is that it isn't XP compatible. Many kid computers are running WinXP still. I do like the remote aspects of it but not enough to use it myself.

It's OK. My main issue with it, aside from not liking MSFT's Windows Live stuff much, is that it isn't XP compatible. Many kid computers are running WinXP still. I do like the remote aspects of it but not enough to use it myself.

This is true, but the OP mentions he's using 7, so not an issue here. My son's computer is an old XP laptop, but he's only 5 and never uses it without me sitting literally 5 feet from him, so I know exactly what he's doing. When he gets a little bit older, to the point where he's playing games that need more horsepower etc, then he'll be getting a Win7 machine with FS installed.

It's OK. My main issue with it, aside from not liking MSFT's Windows Live stuff much, is that it isn't XP compatible. Many kid computers are running WinXP still. I do like the remote aspects of it but not enough to use it myself.

This is true, but the OP mentions he's using 7, so not an issue here. My son's computer is an old XP laptop, but he's only 5 and never uses it without me sitting literally 5 feet from him, so I know exactly what he's doing. When he gets a little bit older, to the point where he's playing games that need more horsepower etc, then he'll be getting a Win7 machine with FS installed.

Even when my kids were younger I had something on there. They get into Google and such awfully fast and you just never know what's going to show up. I honestly care more about the accidental "What's that?!" moments than anything else. If a kid's going to seek out boobies then they're going to do it.

Oh, it's true; I did catch him filling out the sign-up form for Twitter a while back (before he could even really read, but he knew enough to start typing his name in the username field...), and there have been cases where he was watching something on Youtube and ended up looking at really odd (not bad, just odd) stuff. Moving to 7 will probably be a sooner rather than later thing.

Kids aren't motivated by the same things as you disgusting perverts. They want cartoons, whatever's on TV right now, games. Porn just doesn't interest them, might result in some awkward questions, that's about it. They're not the sex-mad fucks we are. All porn is to them is ugly people doing icky things.

Worry more about, in my experience (supplying content-filter-free Internet to a 7 year old and 10 year old pair of girls) being asked how to play Barbie dress-up. Because you're going to look bad when you don't know how to show them how to do it.

I'm not worried about porn; I have a few years at least before that's a concern. But that doesn't mean that a kid can't get themselves into places I don't want them to be. I mean, just watching trailers on Youtube and clicking the related links can get you into fairly explicit violence pretty rapidly, among other things.

Kids aren't motivated by the same things as you disgusting perverts. They want cartoons, whatever's on TV right now, games. Porn just doesn't interest them, might result in some awkward questions, that's about it. They're not the sex-mad fucks we are. All porn is to them is ugly people doing icky things.

Worry more about, in my experience (supplying content-filter-free Internet to a 7 year old and 10 year old pair of girls) being asked how to play Barbie dress-up. Because you're going to look bad when you don't know how to show them how to do it.

Wouldn't help anyhow. Aside from drinking too much too soon before going to bed, wetting the bed is most often due to anxiety or sexual abuse. Just sayin' ...

Well, he's not anxious, so .... hey, wait a minute!

Actually, I was being deadly serious. Otherwise hidden anxiety is nearly as damaging as the sexual abuse, to be honest. It can be caused by anything from body image to bullying in preschool to a scary movie on TV. You simply never know.

Most of the time it's something quite simple but it can be a serious red flag folks ought to be aware of.

No, like I'd go to enter supervisor mode, enter my password, and K9 would say "incorrect password", and I'd have to reset the password. After the third or fourth time doing that, I lost some faith in the app, and mostly was just annoyed with it.

No, like I'd go to enter supervisor mode, enter my password, and K9 would say "incorrect password", and I'd have to reset the password. After the third or fourth time doing that, I lost some faith in the app, and mostly was just annoyed with it.

Odd, I have never had that happen to me and I've got it on the latest versions. Are you sure there's no way it was an issue like Numlock turned on on a laptop keyboard? I've had that nail me before.

Mine has an "@" and a "#" in it, as well as upper- and lower-case and numbers. I'd have K9 reset my password, then I'd log in and change it to the one I want... but then when I'd go back to log in later, it wouldn't take the new password.

If this is systemic with this app, then it's greatly limited as far as passwrod protection. I have never used it. When my kids were your age brodie, the w3 wasn't as eval as today. I had lots of fun teaching my then 6 year old daughter to run Acronis and make an image. Of course, this wasn't for my system's protection as I already had several images stored, but for her education. Then we moved on to Macs and all changed. I always kept my PC though, as I was tired of dealing with Mac and Linux before coming to Windows. Ah, them were da days my friend....